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Library / Literature & Fiction

The Bravo of Venice: A Romance

by Heinrich Zschokke

Pages
about 123
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
2.3 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 75 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS, who professed to have translated this romance out of the German, very much, I believe, as Horace Walpole professed to have taken The Castle of Otranto from an old Italian manuscript, was born in 1775 of a wealthy family. His father had an estate in India and a post in a Government office. His mother was daughter to Sir Thomas Sewell, Master of the Rolls in the reign of George III. She was a young mother; her son Matthew was devoted to her from the first. As a child he called her “Fanny,” and as a man held firmly by her when she was deserted by her husband. From Westminster School, M. G. Lewis passed to Christ Church, Oxford. Already he was busy over tales and plays, and wrote at college a farce, never acted, a comedy, written at the age of sixteen, The East Indian, afterwards played for Mrs. Jordan’s benefit and repeated with great success, and also a novel, never published, called The Effusions of Sensibility, which was a burlesque upon the sentimental school. He wrote also what he called “a romance in the style of The Castle of Otranto,” which appeared afterwards as the play of The Castle Spectre.

With his mind thus interested in literature of the romantic form, young Lewis, aged seventeen, after a summer in Paris, went to Germany, settled for a time at Weimar, and, as he told his mother, knocked his brains against German as hard as ever he could. “I have been introduced,” he wrote, in July, 1792, “to M. de Goethe, the celebrated author of Werter, so you must not be surprised if I should shoot myself one of these fine mornings.” In the spring of 1793 the youth returned to England, very full of German romantic tale and song, and with more paper covered with wild fancies of his own. After the next Christmas he returned to Oxford.

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